An article titled "reaping gold through bt cotton," which first appeared in the Nagpur edition of the Times of India in 2008, reappeared unchanged in 2011, this time with a small print alert that the article was a "marketing feature". In both cases, the article was factually incorrect and made false claims about the success of Monsanto's genetically modified cotton.
Sainath: I look at the stories that corporations plant. Monsanto and Times of India jointly planted a story last year, which was actually an advertisement, 304 Biography 37.1 (Winter 2014) which they had run four years earlier as a story. I had fun with that. I had fun because I had their tails in a cage, and had the cage lid down and just watched them squirm. They couldn’t do anything about it. The construction of fraud is very easy. The destruction of a fraud takes a lot of work, takes a lot of time.
Shankar: So, what about advertisements as stories that corporations construct about themselves, that are also in the media? Sainath: That is the far more dominant stream. The valorization of the corporation is how the media do the stenography to the powerful! Leave aside print media, take television channels. Every month you will fi nd some television channel giving out business leadership awards to the scum of the corporate world. I think that a very good indicator of where the next scam will come from is to see who the Economic Times now has given a business leadership award to—to see to whom CNBC-18 has given a business leadership award. Why should media be giving awards to businessmen? They don’t give awards to the best nurse or the best bus driver, or best school teacher. They give awards for business leaders because that’s where their money is coming from. In print we’ve done it differently by valorizing and creating as role models the scum of the earth. Why the Donald Trumps and Alan Millikens and all these guys?
Sainath: I look at the stories that corporations plant. Monsanto and Times of India jointly planted a story last year, which was actually an advertisement, 304 Biography 37.1 (Winter 2014) which they had run four years earlier as a story. I had fun with that. I had fun because I had their tails in a cage, and had the cage lid down and just watched them squirm. They couldn’t do anything about it. The construction of fraud is very easy. The destruction of a fraud takes a lot of work, takes a lot of time.
Shankar: So, what about advertisements as stories that corporations construct about themselves, that are also in the media? Sainath: That is the far more dominant stream. The valorization of the corporation is how the media do the stenography to the powerful! Leave aside print media, take television channels. Every month you will fi nd some television channel giving out business leadership awards to the scum of the corporate world. I think that a very good indicator of where the next scam will come from is to see who the Economic Times now has given a business leadership award to—to see to whom CNBC-18 has given a business leadership award. Why should media be giving awards to businessmen? They don’t give awards to the best nurse or the best bus driver, or best school teacher. They give awards for business leaders because that’s where their money is coming from. In print we’ve done it differently by valorizing and creating as role models the scum of the earth. Why the Donald Trumps and Alan Millikens and all these guys?
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